Hey goobers - extremely pleased to announce the April 6 2015 release of NO FANS COMPENDIUM by Richard Youngs. See below for a 40 minute audio sampler, the full track listing, and some snaps of the folios being printed by the mighty Stumptown Printers in Portland, OR. We'll announce full ordering details soon.

NO FANS COMPENDIUM is a deluxe limited edition 7 CD set of Richard Youngs’ recordings for his long-running private NO FANS label. 5 CDs are Richard’s personal selection from his NO FANS releases, all of which were issued in tiny editions (20 – 50) and only available for sale at Richard’s rare shows or at Glasgow’s now defunct Volcanic Tongue shop. In addition, Richard has included two full discs of material previously unavailable in any form - a recording from 1989 pre-dating his earliest widely-known work, and a new recording from late 2014. Unbeatable as a survey of Richard’s career, everything here is of equal quality to his over-the-counter releases. In keeping with his penchant for unpredictable stylistic mashups and reinventions, there are folky laments, achingly beautiful “songs,” tape collage, rude prog noise, minimalist experiments, multi-tracked vocals, etc. Each disc is housed in an individual card folio with artwork repurposed from the original releases.

Disc 1 - 20th Century Jams1. 19 Used Postage Stamps 2. Inner Sky Part II 3. May Verses 4. Live In My Head

Every December 5th now brings an avalanche of pics, videos, and music to commemorate Jack's 2009 passing - here's a little contribution I found during a recent cleanup of our archives. This is from a CD that Jack sent us as a proposed new release in early 2005. The letter below references a phone conversation where he mused that he might instead use the tracks for a few small-run singles and EP tracks that he'd promised various labels. Contrary to his heritage as a free-wheeling improvisor with Pelt, Jack worried over a fairly small repertoire for his solo shows and recordings, reworking songs over and over until he was completely satisfied with how he played them. Eventually, he ended up scrapping this sequence and re-recording some of these songs (with a couple of substitutions) to produce the Kensington Blues LP/CD that remains his masterwork.

As part of reworking our long neglected web site, we've added the ability to stream the entire contents of all of our releases - even the bad parts. You can listen to each release on its individual page, or go to our soundcloud site. We'll eventually add unreleased and out of print titles.

Very pleased to announce two new releases for Spring 2014, our first in almost 2 years:

vhf#135 - H. Usui - Sings the Blues LP (+CD)

Solo darkness from Japanese legend (Ghost, Fushitsusha, Marble Sheep, August Born, etc). Raw and gripping, a darker version of his all time classic Holy Letters (vhf#84). Limited edition includes CD version of the album.

vhf#134 Jesse Sparhawk & Eric Carbonara - Tributes & Diatribes CD

2nd VHF release of beautiful cosmic duets on level harp and Indian guitar by this Philadelphia area duo. If you like Popol Vuh, Fahey, Third Ear Band, ragas, etc - this is for you.